Released 1988
Stars Mark Harmon, Blair Brown, Jonathan Silverman, Harold Ramis, William McNamara
Directed by Steven Kampmann, William Porter

The problem is possibly with me. I detested "Stealing Home" so much, from beginning to end, that I left the screening wondering if any movie could possibly be that bad. "Stealing Home" is a real squirmer, a movie so earnest and sincere and pathetic and dripping with pathos that it cries out to be satirized. The only way to save this movie would be a new soundtrack with savagely cynical dialogue over the sappy images. This is one of those movies where the filmmakers remember the golden days of their adolescence and are so overcome with emotion that they fail to recognize their memories as cliches learned from other movies. There is not a second in this film that seems inspired by real life, and since the film is plugged as the hero's autobiography, that's a serious flaw.

The film stars Mark Harmon as a third-rate professional baseball player who is throwing his life away, when one day he gets a call that Katie Chandler (Jodie Foster) is dead. When he was a kid, Katie was like an older sister to him, encouraging him to do his best while simultaneously tantalizing him with her rebellious spirit. He first met her when he was 10, and they spent carefree summers together on the Jersey Shore while she shone like a beacon through his teenage years. But then they sort of drifted apart, and there were reports of a couple of unhappy marriages, and now she has committed suicide.

Summary by Roger Ebert